Filming the ‘Limbo of Interchange’ of/from the Bodies. Visual Anthropology and Sensory Engagement in Ethnographic Filmmaking with the Peruvian Religious Cultural Association Virgen de Cocharcas

Abstract

This paper is the result of intermittent fieldwork conducted between 2018 and 2024 with the Peruvian religious and cultural association Virgen de Cocharcas in Rome, in the framework of the project “Le statue da vestire dell’area metropolitana di Roma”, promoted by the Soprintendenza ABAP for the metropolitan area of Rome, the province of Viterbo, and Southern Etruria. Audiovisual media decisively shaped our ethnographic engagement, both legitimising our presence in the field and enabling a collaborative project with the Association—thus delineating the contours of what may be understood as a “shared epistemology.” The camera emerged not merely as a device of documentation but as a constitutive instrument of encounter, fostering reflexive processes of knowledge co-production (‘enskilment’) entangled with gestures, sensory experience, and the materiality of devotional practices. Filming illuminated the performative dimensions of faith, foregrounding the body as an active medium of ritual and social significance. The intimate relational proximities cultivated during the ethnographic filmmaking experience profoundly shaped processes of filming, selection, and editing, generating tensions between affective involvement and narrative efficacy. Rather than restitution, our research experience suggests an ongoing reconstruction unfolding within a “limbo of interchange,” a contrapuntal space where heterogeneous perspectives and power relations converge, and where visual anthropology not only records but actively reconfigures embodied practices.